Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2009. This is a bill that is worthy of support by both sides of the House and worthy of support now. This is a reintroduced bill, so it is not the first time it has been in the House. It is a bill that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, of which I am chair, examined. The committee made certain recommendations for amendments that should take place, and the government picked up most of those recommendations.

The member for Cook, who preceded me in the debate, is the Deputy Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. He talks about bipartisanship. Words are cheap. Actions speak louder than words. I want to go to the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and read the two recommendations of the dissenting members, of whom the member for Cook was one. Recommendation 1 was:

Coalition Members believe that further debate in the Senate on this Bill should be deferred until proper public scrutiny and discussion of the Green Paper and the report of the Joint Standing Committee into Electoral Matters into the reference made by the Senate on 11 March 2008.

That has been the mantra of the opposition: ‘Do them all together; do not do them a little bit at a time.’ That is something that I think can be dismantled with very little debate. Let us have a look at the merits of each of the propositions. The second recommendation of the minority report was to amend clause 40—proposed section 306AE of the bill—in relation to anonymous donations, to increase the threshold from $50, which we recommended, to $250. So when it came to making recommendations in relation to the substantive provisions of the bill, the only difference between the government and the opposition is that the government members of the committee recommended $50—because it was at a $0 level—and opposition members recommended $250.

See this speech in context